War Crimes

The other one isn't that like mine.. (Started by Panzerknacker)Owyes: I wanted to post these all together (the reports, but on a stupid way it didn't work, well you can read them on this way.. READ THEM; you can give comment etcetera.. Pictures will come too)

Since there always is talked about "War Crimes" this is a good place to discuss them and information/Photos/stories about these War Crimes.

I saw never a real thread about War Crimes so I wanted one, so we could talk about those War Crimes. German/Americans/Soviet.... they all did War Crimes

Some War Crimes:source: unknown

THE NORMANDY MASSACRES (June, 1944) by HJ
A sensation was caused in Allied Headquarters when reports came through that a considerable number of Canadian soldiers were shot after being taken prisoner by the 12th. SS Panzer Division ‘Hitler Jugend’. On the morning of June 8th. thirty seven Canadians were taken prisoner by the 2nd. Battalion of the 26th. Panzer Grenadier Regiment. The prisoners were marched across country to the H/Q of the 2nd. Battalion. In the village of Le Mesnil-Patty they were then ordered to sit down in a field with their wounded in the center. In a short while a half track arrived with eight or nine SS soldiers brandishing their machine pistols. Advancing in line towards the prisoners they opened fire killing thirty five men. Two of the Canadians ran for their lives and escaped the slaughter but were rounded up by a different German unit to spend the rest of the war in a POW camp. First to make contact with the Canadians was a combat group led by Obersturmbannfuhrer Karl-Heinz Milius and supported by the Prinz Battalion. Near the villages of Authie and Buron , a number of Canadians of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, were taken prisoner. Numbering around forty, they were individually killed on the march back to the rear. Eight were ordered to remove their helmets and then shot with automatic rifles. Their bodies were dragged out on to the road and left to be run over by trucks and tanks. French civilians pulled the bodies back on to the pavement but were ordered to stop and to drag the bodies back onto the road again.
On the 7th and 8th of June, in the grounds of the Abbaye Ardenne, the headquarters of SS Brigadefuhrer Kurt Meyer’s 25th Panzer Grenadiers, twenty of the Canadians were shot. After being taken prisoner they were locked up in a stable and being called out by name they emerged from the doorway only to be shot in the back of the head. During the afternoon of 8th June, twenty six Canadians were shot at the Chateau d’Audrieu after being taken prisoner by a Reconnaissance Battalion of the SS Hitler Jugend. Other units of the German forces in France called the Hitler Jugend Division the ‘Murder Division’. After the war, investigations established that separate atrocities were committed in 31 different incidents involving 134 Canadians, 3 British and 1 American. Brought to trial before a Canadian military court at Aurich in Germany on 28 December, 1945, Kurt Meyer was sentenced to death but later reprieved and spent six years in Canadian jails before being transferred to Germany where he was released on September 7, 1954. He died of a heart attack on December 23, 1961, at age 51.

LE PARADIS (Pas-de-Calais, May 26,1940) By Totenkopf
A company of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, trapped in a cowshed, surrendered to the 2nd Infantry Regiment, SS 'Totenkopf' (Death's Head) Division under the command of 28 year old SS Obersturmfuhrer Fritz Knoechlein. Marched to a group of farm buildings, they were lined up in the meadow along side the barn wall. When the 99 prisoners were in position, two machine guns opened fire killing 97 of them. The bodies were then buried in a mass grave on the farm property. Two managed to escape, Privates Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan of the Royal Norfolk Regiment emerged from the slaughter wounded but alive. When the SS troops moved on, the two wounded soldiers were discovered, after having hid in a pig-sty for three days and nights, by Madame Castel of Le Paradis who then cared for them till captured again by another Wehrmacht unit to spend the rest of the war as POWs. In 1942, the bodies of those executed were exhumed by the French authorities and reburied in the local churchyard now part of the Le Paradis War Cemetery. After the war, the massacre was investigated and Knoechlein was traced and arrested. During the war he had been awarded three Knight's Crosses. Tried before a War Crimes Court in Hamburg, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, and on January 28, 1949, the sentence was carried out. Married with four children, his wife attended the trial every day.

Click to expand...

The first is a famous one from the famous divison 12TH SS-HITLERJUGEND.

WORMHOUDT (Pas-de-Calais, 27/28 May, 1940) By LSSAH
The day after the Le Paradis massacre, some 80 men of the 2nd Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery, were taken prisoner by the No7 Company, 2nd Battalion of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. At Esquelbecq, near the town of Wormhoudt, the prisoners were marched into a large barn, and there the massacre began. Stick grenades were lobbed in amongst the defenceless prisoners who died in agony as shrapnel tore into their flesh. When the last grenade had been thrown, the survivors were then ordered outside, there to be mown down under a hail of bullets from automatic weapons. The SS then entered the barn again to finish off the wounded. Fifteen men survived the atrocity, only to give themselves up to other German units to serve out the war as POWs. Unlike the Le Paradis massacre, the victims of Wormhoudt were never avenged, as after the war no survivor could positively identify any of the SS soldiers involved.

ORADOUR-SUR-GLANE (Central France, June 10, 1944) By Das Reich
On their 450 mile drive from the south of France to the Normandy invasion area, the 2nd SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich' (15,000 men aboard 1,400 vehicles, including 209 tanks) under the command of SS General Lammerding, arrived at Limoges, a town famous for its porcelain. In the small town of St. Junien (30 kilometres from Limoges) the 'Der Führer Regiment' was regrouping. Following many encounters with the local maquis in which two German soldiers were killed, a unit of the regiment arrived at ORADOUR (believed to be a hotbed of maquis activity) in a convoy of trucks and half-tracks. At about 2 PM on this Saturday afternoon the 120 man SS unit surrounded the village ordering all inhabitants to parade in the market square for an identity check. Women and children were separated from the menfolk and herded into the local church. The men were herded in groups into six carefully chosen local garages and barns and shot. Their bodies were then covered with straw and set on fire. The 452 women and children in the church were then suffocated by smoke grenades lobbed in through the windows and sharpnel grenades that were thrown down the nave while machine-guns raked the interior. The church was then set on fire.
Incredibly, one woman, Mme Marguerite Rouffanche, escaped by jumping through a window, she was the only witness to the carnage in the church. (Mme Rouffanche died, aged 91, in March, 1988). Unspeakable atrocities were committed throughout the village, but some men managed to escape. The commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the SS Regiment at ORADOUR was thirty-two year old SS Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, a survivor of the Russian Front. He was later killed in the Normandy battle area on 30th of June when hit in the head by shrapnel. Many members of the "Das Reich" reacted with surprising venom against the officer who ordered the massacre and a court martial was established but Diekmann died before the trial took place. The world heard of this massacre eight years later when some of those responsible were brought to trial. In 1953, a French Military Court at Bordeaux, established that 642 people (245 women, 207 children and 190 men) had perished. Twenty-one other members of his company (including fourteen Frenchmen from Alsace-Lorraine who had been conscripted into the SS) were sentenced to death but later their sentences were commuted to terms of imprisonment. All were released by 1959. SS General Lammerding died peacefully at his home at Bad Toltz in Germany on the 13th of January 1971, of cancer. A close friend of Diekmann was Major Helmut Kampfe, commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion of the Der Führer Regiment. He was kidnapped and executed by the FTP (Communists) the day before the massacre. His kidnapping was not the only reason for the events at Oradour. Gold, looted by the Nazis, and then stolen by the Maquis, was rumoured to be hidden in the village, why else the indiscriminate destruction?.
Today, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane stands in ruins, just as the SS left it.

THE TULLE MURDERS (Near Limoges, Central France, June 9, 1944)
By Das Reich
The day before the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane , the SS murdered 99 men in the town of Tulle in central France. This was in response to activities by the local FTP resistance groups who had attacked and taken over the town. When the 2nd SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich' took over the town they found 40 dead bodies of the German 3rd Battalion/95th Security Regiment garrison troops near the school, their bodies badly mutilated. Other bodies were found around the town, bringing the total German dead in Tulle to sixty-four. Next day, the reprisals began. All males in the town were gathered together and 130 suspects were selected for execution. A number were released because of their youth and the remaining 99 were executed by the Pioneer platoon of SS-Panzer Aufklarungs Abteilung 2. Their bodies were hung up on lamp-posts and from balconies along the main streets of the town in the hope that the hanging bodies would deter future attacks by the Maquis and the FTP. More would have been hanged had not the SS ran out of rope. Instead, they rounded up 149 civilians and deported them to Germany for slave labour. Of these, 101 did not return.

ASCQ (Near Lille, April 2, 1944) BY HJ
At the end of March, 1944, the 12th SS Panzer Division 'Hitler Jugend' set out on 24 rail trucks for Normandy to cover the coast in anticipation of an Allied landing. The convoy, under the command of SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck, was approaching the small railway station of Ascq when a violent explosion blew the line apart. Stopping the train, it was found that two flat trucks had been derailed, holding up the whole convoy. Hauck, in a foul mood, ordered his men to search and arrest all male members of the houses on both sides of the track. They were assembled together and marched down the track about 300 yards where each man was shot in the back of the head. Altogether 70 men were shot beside the railway line and another 16 killed in the village itself. After an investigation by the Gestapo, six more men were arrested and charged with planting the bomb. They were all executed by firing squad. When the war ended, a search for the perpetrators was set in motion. Most of the SS men were found in Allied POW camps in Europe and in England. In all, nine SS men stood trial in a French Military Court at Lille. All were sentenced to death, including Hauck. The sentences were later commuted to a period of imprisonment and Walter Hauck was released in July, 1957.

SANT' ANNA MASSACRE (August 12, 1944) BY RFSS
Just north of Pisa, between the towns of Lucca and Currara, lay the small village of S.Anna di Stazzema. On August 4, British troops had freed the city of Florence (Firenze) and the German armies were now retreating northwards through the mountainous region of Tuscany, ideal terrain for partisan activity. Many of the German troops were killed in ambushes and skirmishes with the Italian underground movement. On August 12, the 6th Panzergrenadieren 'Reichsführer-SS' Division reached the outskirts of Sant' Anna, their orders to shoot on sight all partisans found in the area. Believing that the inhabitants of the Sant'Anna were all partisans or partisan sympathizers, the SS started knocking on doors and shouting 'Heraus! Heraus!' ('out of here!'). Gathered together on the village square, the men, women and children, were then shot in cold blood. In all, 560 people were massacred including 110 children. The houses in the village were then burned to the ground, the church organ was riddled with machine-gun bullets and the christening font completely destroyed by a grenade. Many of the corpses were doused with petrol and then set alight before the SS unit departed.

ATROCITY AT BARDINE SAN TERENZO (August 20, 1944) By RFSS
In the area around the village of Bardine San Terenzo, the SS 16 Reichsführer Division was deployed to counteract partisan activity against German troops. Seventeen German soldiers had been ambushed and their truck set on fire. All seventeen were killed. A search of various villages was undertaken where the SS looted and burned a number of houses. Fifty-three villagers were taken to the burned out truck and tied to the chassis of the vehicle and to field posts nearby. Next day a local priest, Padre Lino Piane, discovered the fifty-three bodies. All had been shot. Most of the victims were from the village of Mezzana Castello, those from Bardine were taken to Valla and there, shot. There were 107 persons in all. Only five were men, the rest, women and children. In the four days that the search continued, a total of 369 hostages were brutally massacred and 454 houses destroyed by fire. In overall charge of the SS troops in this incident was Major Walter Reder, the one-armed SS officer responsible for the massacres on the Monte Sole.

THE BOVES ATROCITY (September 17th, 1944) BY LSSAH
A few kilometres north of Cuneo in Italy, lies the town of Boves. After September 8th, 1943, it became an active center of the Italian underground because of the stationing of many stragglers from the now disbanded Regio Esercito (Royal Italian Army). These partisans were led by Bartolomeo Giuliano, Ezio Aceto and Ignazio Vian. After repeated requests to surrender, the partisans refused in spite of leaflets being dropped by the SS. On the 17th of September the German commander, SS Major Joachim Peiper, ordered two gun crews to shell the town. The partisans again refused to surrender. Two German soldiers were then sent forward (as decoys) to be captured by the partisans. Hoping they would be killed, it would give Peiper the pretext for a slaughter. The parish priest, Father Giuseppe Bernardi and the industrialist, Alessandro Vassallo, were ordered to meet with the partisans and to persuade them to release the two soldiers. The priest asked Peiper 'Will you spare the town?'. Peiper gave his word and the two prisoners were released. But the blood-thirsty SS then proceeded to burn all the houses in the town after which Father Bernardi and Vassallo were put into a car to do an inspection of the devastated town. 'They must admire the spectacle' said Peiper. After the inspection, Father Bernardi and his companion, Vassallo, were sprinkled with petrol and set alight. Both were burned to death. Forty-three other inhabitants of Boves were killed that day and 350 houses destroyed. Next day, a column of armoured vehicles went up the road that led to the partisan base. A lucky shot from their only 75 mm gun destroyed the leading armoured car. After an intense fire-fight the SS retreated with heavy losses. One of the partisan leaders, Ignazio Vian, was later captured by the SS and hanged in Turin. On the wall of his cell he had written in his own blood the words "Better Die Rather Than Betray".

THE MALMEDY MASSACRE (December 17, 1944) By LSSAH
During the Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge) the Combat Group of the 1st SS Panzer Division, led by SS Major Joachim Peiper, was approaching the crossroads at Baugnes near the town of Malmedy . There they encountered a company of US troops (Battery B of the 285th. Field Artillery Observation Battalion) from the US 7th Armoured Division. Realizing that the odds were hopeless, the company's commander, Lt.Virgil Lary, decided to surrender. After being searched by the SS, the prisoners were marched into a field by the crossroads. The SS troops moved on except for two Mark IV tanks Nos.731 and 732, left behind to guard the GIs. An order was given to fire and SS Private Georg Fleps of tank 731 drew his pistol and fired at Lary's driver who fell dead in the snow. The machine guns of both tanks then opened fire on the prisoners. Many of the GIs took to their heels and fled to the nearest woods. Incredibly, 43 GIs survived, but 86 of their comrades lay dead in the field, being slowly covered with a blanket of snow. The US troops in the area were issued with an order that for the next week no SS prisoners were to be taken.
At the end of the war, Peiper, and 73 other suspects (arrested for other atrocities committed during the offensive) were brought to trial. When the trial ended on July 16, 1946, forty three of the defendants were sentenced to death, twenty two to life imprisonment, two to twenty years, one for fifteen years and five to ten years. Peiper and Fleps were among those sentenced to death, but after a series of reviews the sentences were reduced to terms in prison. On December 22, 1956, SS Sturmbannführer Peiper was released. He settled in the small village of Traves in northern France in 1972 and four years later, on the eve of Bastille Day, he was murdered and his house burned down by a French communist group. His charred body was recovered from the ruins and transferred to the family grave in Schondorf , near Landsberg in Bavaria. Most of the remains of the murdered GIs were eventually shipped back to the US for private burial but twenty one still lie buried in the American Military Cemetery at Henri-Chappelle, about forty kilometers north of Malmedy.
Today, the American flag flies over the Memorial built at the Baugnes crossroads, about 50 metres from where the actual killings took place.

MASSACRE AT DISTOMO (June 10, 1944) By Polizei
Four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy a most despicable atrocity took place in the village of Distomo, in the province of Boeotia in Central Greece. A unit of the SS Police Panzergrenadier Regiment No 7, on an antipartisan sweep, massacred 218 Greek civilians in the village. Packed into seven trucks, the unit drove through the village without incident but a short distance beyond the village the convoy was ambushed by a guerrilla band that resulted in the killing of seven SS soldiers. The SS unit doubled back into the village and in a last ditch effort to crush partisan activities, the reprisals, including looting, burning and rape, began. When a Red Cross delegation visited the village some days later they found bodies hanging from trees along the main street. One survivor, Yannes Basdekis, recalled, "I walked into a house and saw a woman, stripped naked and covered in blood. Her breasts had been sliced off. Her baby lay dead nearby, the cut off nipple still in its mouth". The unit commander, SS Hauptstrumführer Lautenbach was later charged with falsifying a military report on the massacre but the charges were dropped as the massacre was judged a 'military necessity'. Today, the skulls and bones of the victims are displayed in the Mausoleum of Distomo. In 1960, Germany paid the Greek government 115 million marks as compensation for the suffering of its citizens during the German occupation but as yet no payment is forthcoming for the victims of Distomo. It was not until 1990 that members of the German embassy first took part in the wreath laying ceremony on the annual anniversary of the massacre. (It is somewhat ironic that other massacres took place on a same date, the 10th of June, Lidice in 1943, Oradour-zur-Glane and Distomo, in 1944.

VILLAGE MASSACRES By Prinz Eugen
On March 27, 1944, troops of the 7th SS Prinz Eugen Division massacred 834 Serbian civilians and set fire to around 500 houses in the villages of Ruda, Cornji, Dorfer Otok and Dalnji in Dalmatia. The troops were engaged in fighting the Yugoslavian communist guerrilla forces and the massacre was a collective punishment for those supporting the partisans. Earlier, in May 1943, the Prinz Eugen Division marched into Monternegro and occupied the Niksic district. In one village, 121 persons, mostly women, were brutally murdered. They included 29 children under 14 and 30 persons between the ages of 60 and 92. In 1943, the Prinz Eugen Division was made up mostly of ethnic Germans from Serbia and Croatia. On July 28, 1944, the Division, supported by the Albanian 21st SS Skanderberg Division, made up mostly of Muslims from Kosovo and engaged in a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing against the Kosovo Serbian and Jewish populations, surrounded the village of Velika and in an orgy of looting and killing massacred 428 Serbs, looted and burned down 300 houses. On October 9, 1941, some 2,000 communists and Jews were shot on the basis of Hitler's 100 to 1 order. This happened in a village near Topola after the killing of 22 men of the 2nd Battalion of the 421st Army Signal Communication Regiment. The shooting was carried out on the orders of General Franz Boehme, Commanding General in Serbia. (Boehme committed suicide while awaiting trial)

ATROCITY AT THE MARIE CURIE INSTITUTE By Kaminski and Dirlewanger men
At 10.30am on August 5, 1944, one hundred armed troops in German uniform barged into the Maria Curie-Sklodowska Radium Institute on Wawelska Street in Warsaw. Shouting in loud voices they began searching and looting the entire building. The majority of the soldiers were drunk and were shooting at anyone who barred their way. In the Institute were 80 staff members and about 90 patients. All were robbed of their jewellery, money and personal items. The staff members were taken to a camp at Zieleniak a few kilometres away and for four days and nights were kept in the open without food or water. During this time many of the nurses were dragged out and raped by the drunken mob. At the end of the four days they were transported to Germany for slave labour. Back at the Institute the hospital patients remained in bed while the plundering and destruction of the hospital buildings proceeded. Stores and cupboards were broken open and everything thrown about while some of the female patients were dragged from their beds, assaulted and raped. Around 15 of the seriously sick patients were shot in their beds and their mattresses set on fire. Petrol was poured over the floors of the wards and set alight. Patients still alive (about 70) were then shot, their bodies piled in a heap and doused with petrol and ignited. This atrocity at the Radium Institute took the lives of all patients being treated there. The perpetrators of this horrible crime were mostly Russian soldiers, members of the Vlassov Army. General Vlassov was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1942 and later commanded an army of Russian prisoners of war who volunteered to fight on the German side rather than starve to death in German prison camps.

1st:Mass grave of 300 Polish POWs of the Polish 74 Infantry Regiment murdered near Ciepielow by the German 15th Motorized Infantry Regiment of German 29th Motorized Division Commanded by General Joachim Lemelsen.

In the camp of detainees in dachau no one does not dispute that were committed terrible crimes,
I would want we receive however that in the release dachau if committed also the allies crimes of war

Click to expand...

What? Your English is very broken, and I want to make sure I understand what you are saying/insinuating before I respond. Are you saying the Allies committed war crimes as well? If so, please produce a list of said crimes for the rest of us to peruse.

What? Your English is very broken, and I want to make sure I understand what you are saying/insinuating before I respond. Are you saying the Allies committed war crimes as well? If so, please produce a list of said crimes for the rest of us to peruse.

Click to expand...

I am agreeing with this quote... it is the posting by Tixodioktis to which I am responding....

I'm sorry, but I don't find the website convincing. No one questions that in warfare sometimes the worst is brought out in a few people, and that sometimes people take retribution upon themselves when they discover someone who has committed a heinous crime.

A website which may post photos out of context is not proof of the accusation. As there were survivors at Dachau that day, I would find their testimony more convincing.

I actually started to go through the book Canadians Behind Enemy Lines: 1939-1945 by Roy MacLaren for the thread Spies Like Us to add some information that probably wasn’t widely known. While I will still add information there later, I was saddened to read what happened to some of the first Canadians with the S.O.E. who went to France in early 1944 and were captured by the Germans. Their treatment following capture and the manner of their deaths were war crimes.

“The first two months of 1944 were disastrous for Canadians with S.O.E. in France. Bieler was captured in St. Quentin; Byerly, Deniset, and Sabourin were parachuted to awaiting Germans; and another Canadian, Alcide Beauregard of the Eastern Townships of Quebec, was also destined never to return.

Beauregard originally enlisted in the Regiment de Masonneuve (he had arrived in Britain with Bieler and Chartrand) and later transferred to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. Dark, Slight, and by prewar training an electrical and radio mechanic, the twenty-six-year-old Beauregard volunteered for S.O.E. in mid-1943, when there was an acute shortage of French-speaking wireless operators. The enemy had long realized that wireless operators were the most vulnerable link in the S.O.E. chain. If an operator could be eliminated, a whole circuit could be paralysed. The premium on operators was exceptionally high. As a result, many operators, including Beauregard, were given accelerated training. On his Ringway parachute course in late November, Beauregard sprained an ankle. Accordingly, on 8 February 29454, he was landed by Lysander east of Tours (on almost the same field where Chartrand had been deposited a year before) to journey across France to his assignment in Lyon. Beauregard was to be radio operator to a Frenchman in his fifties, J.E. Lesage, who had already worked with a circuit in Lyon and was returning from training in Britain to establish a new sub-circuit of the larger “Ditcher” circuit based on Lyon. Lesage, however, soon proved to be of no further uses as an organizer. During his first tour, he had so alienated other resistance workers that he could find few still willing to cooperate with him. When Lesage retreated into bucolic inactivity, Beauregard was left without a circuit chief. What he did thereafter is no clear from the scant records in London and Ottawa, although it appears that he joined “Ditcher” in Lyon. A Canadian army record suggests that he operated his wireless set continually from the house of a schoolmaster. London apparently warned Beauregard of the growing danger from wireless detection equipment as he continued to transmit from the same place. With the Allied invasion rapidly approaching, Beauregard accepted the risks in view of the heavy volume of messages – which, by their numbers, also increased the chances of his detection. He was caught on 15 July, but only after he had destroyed his wireless set and codes with the help of the schoolmaster’s son.

After being interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters in the Place Bellecoeur, Beauregard was imprisoned in Fort Monluc, a dark, gloomy fort in Lyon. A postwar Canadian intelligence report noted tersely: “His reason is believed to have been unhinged by the tortures to which he was subjected. Lieut. Beauregard gave way no information.” With the approach of the Allied armies up the Rhone, the Gestapo in Lyon carried out Hitler’s order to execute all resistance and “commando” prisoners. On 20 August, Beauregard and one hundred and twenty of the resistance were machine-gunned to death at St. Genie Laval. Hand grenades were thrown among their bodies to ensure that no one was still alive. Himmler had always intended that all such “terrorists” should be murdered, “but not before torture, indignity and interrogation had drained from them that last shred and scintilla of evidence which should lead to the arrest of others. Then, and only then, should the blessed release of death be granted them.” Having disclosed nothing, the time had come for Beauregard to be cast aside.

And so it was for all the captured Canadian agents. None survived the autumn of 1944; they were of no further use to the Germans. And neither the Gestapo nor the S.S. wanted surviving Allied agents to report to their liberators what had been done to them in captivity. In any case, many agents succumbed to the appalling day-to-day conditions of their camps. Of the remainder, most were murdered during the last quarter of 1944 or the first months of 1945. Hitler himself approved an order for some agents to be garrotted with nooses of piano wire; death would then come more slowly and more agonizingly. Beauregard escaped that final degradation by being machine-gunned. Gustave Bieler was also shot, but in a different way – if that is a distinction of any moment.”

By Christmas 1943, time was running out for Bieler and Yolande Beekman. At an overnight meeting in Lille on 25 November, Trotobas had confided to Bieler his concern about the carelessness and incompetence of one of his workers. Two nights later, the agent, under torture, disclosed to the Germans his chief’s hiding place. Trotobas fought it out with the Germans. He and several of his workers who were later captured were soon executed. Bieler, after reporting the disaster to London, did what he could from St. Quentin to help the crippled circuit in Lille to regroup.

Bieler was left too long in France. He should have been brought out after about six months – long enough for any agent, however dexterous, brave, and security-conscious. But Bieler stayed, since “F” Section, greatly pleased by his success, wanted to expand his circuit to help meet the increased needs for sabotage, both preceding and following the anticipated Allied invasion. In a sense, Bieler became a victim of the omnipresent tension arising from the long-term need to husband resources for the impending invasion and the immediate need to harass the enemy wherever and whenever possible.

Bieler’s success was, in a sense, his own undoing. It attracted the intensified attention of the Germans. Having his own wireless operator contributed to his greater efficiency, but it also enabled German counter-intelligence to use its detection equipment to pinpoint the St. Quentin transmission – an advantage they did not have earlier when Bieler was passing messages through other circuits. From October, Beekman had been transmitting from a secluded house. In December, a German automobile equipped with wireless-detection equipment was seen nearby. Beekman hurriedly moved her set to the house of Camille Boury, a pharmacist in the resistance. It was with the Bourys that Bieler and Beekman spent Christmas Eve of 1943, a Christmas that Mme. Boury never forgot:

Guy arrived in his familiar garb (he was almost always dressed as a workman) carrying two Santa Clauses stuffed with candy for our children and under each arm a few good bottles. We listened to the [BBC] messages from London and then the wonderful Christmas music. We had arranged a good Christmas atmosphere with the traditional pine-tree and candles. Guy recited to us (as he could do so well) the beautiful poetry of Victor Hugo. We also sang Canadian and French choruses.

At midnight guy held his head in both hands for a long time. When this…silence…was over, he was very serious and seemed completely overcome. He asked us for a pencil and wrote on the back of one of our photographs an address: “Chief, French Dept., Sun Life Assurance Company, Dominion Square, Montreal.”

He then said to us…”If misfortune overtakes me some day, write to this address. You will find my wife there. Tell her how I spent Christmas of 1943, describe this evening to her. Tell her of how I thought of them.”

He also used to speak to us often of his children…His greatest pleasure was to go and look at my little boy and girl sleeping. They never saw him for he did not want them to be able to chatter. We had to take so many precautions against this accursed Gestapo but each time that he could, he went to see them asleep.”

Within three weeks, as stranger was seen in the Boury’s street, his collar turned up apparently to conceal earphones. Three days later, on 15 January 1944, Bieler and Beekman were at the drab, red-brick Café du Moulin Brule on a lonely road near the St. Quentin Canal where they had spent many evenings. Suddenly, a dozen armed Germans rushed in. The café owner and his wife, along with Bieler and Beekman, were included in the total of forty members of the network arrested that day and the days following. Among the few to escape arrest was a veteran Franco-Swiss agent who had parachuted to Bieler four days before to assist in the demolition of the gates of the canal locks.

The Germans had done their homework well. They had removed the copestone of Bieler’s carefully constructed network. During the following days, they arrested more than a dozen agents in the area, but they were unable to destroy the network completely. Six months later, when the Allied invasion began, several of Bieler’s sabotage and ambush teams were still intact, hindering the arrival of German reinforcements on the Normandy front.

Among those arrested with Bieler was Eugene Cordelette, the land surveyor who had housed him when he had first arrived in St. Quentin fourteen months before. On the night of their arrest, Cordelette saw Bieler in a corridor of the St. Quentin prison, being taken to a small cell after the first of many brutal Gestapo interrogations. “He was chained hand and foot. His face was horribly swollen, but I could read in his eyes this order: ‘Whatever happens, don’t talk!’…In spite of all torments, he showed no weakness.” The horror of Bieler’s treatment seeps through even the usually arid prose of his citation for a posthumous D.S.O.: “Despite the most barbarous forms of torture by the enemy over a period extending over at least eight days, he refused absolutely to divulge the names of any of his associates, or the location of any arms dumps. Despite the intense pain that he was suffering from the injury to his back [broken when he first parachuted into France], he faced the Gestapo with the utmost determination and courage.”

Following almost three months of interrogation during which his back injury was exacerbated and his kneecap broken, the now-emaciated Bieler was sent with fourteen British officers to narrow, windowless cells in the concentration camp which took its name from the nearby Bavarian town of Flossenburg.

In the their tiny concrete cells, Bieler and the British agents were cut off from each other as well as the outside world, aware of the passage from night to day only by the appearance of a watery soup and a dark, spongy substance that passed for bread. There was no exercise, no reading or writing, no news of the war – only solitary confinement, increasing debilitation from malnutrition and the endless struggled to retain one’s sanity. His anxious wife in Montreal knew only from a terse War Office message that he was missing following an operation “somewhere in Europe.” Captain Lunding, a Danish army officer and one of the few survivors of Flossenburg, was in an adjoining cell and later supplied a few details about Bieler’s fate. By September 1944, Bieler had become a physical wreck as a result of his back and leg injuries, torture, and malnutrition. But his courage remained. According to a statement made to Lunding by a camp official the day after the execution, Bieler conducted himself with such courage and dignity that even the camp guards themselves paid a peculiar tribute to him: he had “made so powerful an impression on his captors that when the order for his execution came from Berlin…the S.S. at Flossenburg mounted a guard of honour to escort him as he limped to his death.” For an Allied agent to be executed by firing squad was in itself rare, if dubious, honour. Most agents were hanged as terrorists. Buckmaster recorded, “This is the only instance known to us of an officer being executed in such circumstances by a firing squad with a Guard of Honour.”

Several of Bieler’s French accomplices were also in prison. His radio operator, Yolande Beekman, was in Karlsruhe jail. Three days after Bieler was executed on 9 September 1944, Beekman with three other female S.O.E. agents, was killed at Dachau concentration camp near Munich, shot through the back of the neck.

There is abundant material about Frank Pickersgill’s short life. There is also much detail about his death, and that of Macalister and Sabourin. F.F.E. Yeo-Thomas, one of the most intrepid S.O.E. agents, provides in The White Rabbit a graphic account of his own experiences and the end of the three Canadians at Buchenwald.

On 8 August 1944, with the Allied vanguard twelve days from Paris, the Gestapo had hurriedly rounded up a total of thirty-seven male and female agents from several prisons in and near Paris and sent them by rail to Germany, most destined for the notorious Buchenwald. With Yeo-Thomas aboard that crowded train of death were Sabourin and Defendini, the Corsican to whom he had been assigned as a radio operator; Pickersgill, Macalister, and Culioli who had been arrested with them; Garel whom Chartrand had joined; and Garry to whom Deniset had been sent as wireless operator. The fortitude of Pickersgill shone through again; he attempted to tell jokes. Yeo-Thomas later recalled, “They weren’t particularly funny jokes…At first they weren’t appreciated. Then suddenly everyone realized that Pickersgill was only trying to keep them from all going crazy. They cheered up a bit and took a grip on themselves.”

On the second day, near the German border, the agents almost died an unexpected death. They were left locked in their over-crowded box car while their guards took cover from a roof-top strafing by the R.A.F. After a total of eight days of the foetid confinement, brutality, starvation, and agonizing thirst, all of the prisoners were delivered on the night of 18 August to the gates of Buchenwald. Upon entering they had good reason to abandon hope.* During the following three weeks, the prisoners existed in a world which must have been close to Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of souls writhing in the torments of hell.

As they were marched across the camp the prisoners had their first glimpse of their fellow inmates, and it was anything but reassuring. The compound was filled with emaciated, hairless wretches shuffling wearily round and round in heavy wooden clogs. The eyes of those listless sub-human creatures were mean with terror. On the faces of many of them a sticky stream of yellow rot oozed from purulent sores set in the middle of purple weals. Others were so weak that they staggered as they walked. Even when their clothes were too short for them, they were too wide because of the thinness of the frail bodies which they covered. The same grim question occurred simultaneously to all the thirty-seven as they beheld this gruesome spectacle: “How long is it going to be before we look like them?”

They were…in the worst camp in Germany. Their chances of survival were practically nil: if they did not starve to death they would be worked to death; and if they were not worked to death they would be executed. Every single day more than three hundred prisoners died from starvation or from being beaten by their guards… Each [working party] consisted of hundreds of prisoners quarrying stone, dragging logs or cleaning out latrines…The S.S. guards were also there and so were their Alsatian hounds, and when enough amusement couldn’t be derived from bludgeoning a man’s brains out there was always the alternative of setting the dogs upon him to tear out his throat…

A squat black chimney just beyond the Block was pointed out to them. “That’s the crematorium,” they were told. “It’s the surest of all escape routes; most of us will only get out of this camp by coming through that chimney as smoke.”

On 6 September, three weeks after their night arrival, the camp loudspeaker called for fifteen of the thirty-seven S.O.E. agents to report to the headquarters tower. They did not return to their hut. The following day a Polish prisoner with contacts in the crematorium squad told the remaining agents of their comrades’ deaths. Now the surviving twenty-two could have no more doubt about what awaited them. Three days later, on 9 September – by coincidence the same day Bieler was shot in Flossenburg – another sixteen prisoners were summoned, including the Canadians. According to one postwar account:Some knew what it meant. Others suspected. All hoped for the best. Without a work they fell in, in threes, with Pickersgill at the head of one of the files. At Pickersgill’s command they marched off…., a threadbare, forlorn little band, trying to march like guardsmen. Up front they could see Pickersgill, limping and occasionally staggering as his unhealed wounds, malnutrition and slight deafness combined to unsteady him, a cracked husk of a man, but unbroken.

Pickersgill began flailing the air with his hands, just as he had done on campus years before. But not he was no longer celebrating Andre Gide, passing judgement on Neville Chamberlain or analyzing St. Augustine. He was beating time….

That night the marchers were thrashed and flung into a bunker. An emaciated French priest, Father Georges Stenger from Lorraine, stumbled a mile across the camp and pleaded for permission to administer the last sacrament to the Roman Catholics. He was refused. Stenger stayed all night outside the bunker praying and managed to slip into the captives, via a guard who began to show a sense of shame, wafers of the Sacred Host.

The following night the sixteen were taken to the crematorium and the doors were slammed. Once more Father Stenger knelt outside and prayed. Later he recalled that he’d heard scuffling noises and faint cries of “Vive la France!” “Vive l”Angleterre!” and “Vive le Canada!”

Macalister, Sabourin, and Pickersgill died the cruellest death with Gestapo sadists could devise: they were hanged from meat hooks cemented in a wall, nooses of piano wire slowly strangling them. Theirs was not the quick death of hanging by breaking the neck; it was slow strangulation, garrotting. Hitler had a number of such executions filmed so he might have the pleasure of seeing prisoners perish in agony.

*Sabourin, Pickersgill, and Macalister would not have known it, but at least one other Canadian was in Buchenwald when they arrived. Signalman George Rodrigues of Montreal, an M.I.9 agent, was sent to Buchenwald in late 1943 or early 1944. He survived more than a year of its bestiality, but he died shortly after liberation from the maltreatment which he had received.

The end of Francois Deniset and Robert Byerly is not so well documented. All that is known is that after a period of interrogation and torture at the Gestapo prison in Paris – they were seen there by other agents on 27 June 1944 – they were taken by train to the Gross Rosen concentration camp in Poland where they were executed in September. While varying perhaps in detail, their end cannot have differed so very much from that of their fellow Canadians at Lyon, Flossenburg, and Buchenwald.

And so they died: Byerly, the American serving in the Canadian Army, and six Canadians who had volunteered to serve with the S.O.E. in France – Beauregard, Bieler, Deniset, Macalister, Pickersgill, and Sabourin.

i still cannot for the life of me understand why spies at time of war should be executed. otto skorzeny's commandos were executed simply because they were wearing US army uniforms in the battle of the bulge.

To discourage the use of spying as a means of making war. Actually as I understand the situation it isn't that they SHOULD be shot but that they aren't protected as POW's and therefore CAN be shot. Many spies were shot for treason, betraying their home nations in time of war and so on. Skorzeny's men were shot because they were using US uniforms which meant that they were breaking various conventions and so were not entitled to protection as prisoners, had the US troops who captured them been having a really good day they might have taken them prisoner and looked after them. Unfortunately they were not and so were hardly disposed to treating them well.

There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.
[sigpic][/sigpic]

Media

Resources

Members

About US

Welcome to WWII Forums! You are at a gateway to WWII discussion, research, exploration, & analysis. We directly support the repository at WW2.ORG, and several other worthwhile projects that add to the historical record. Join in if you dare!